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EDMONTON - Kent McKay is so passionate about perfumes, he sometimes spritzes some on before bed.

He actually keeps British designer Alexander McQueen’s fragrance MyQueen beside his bed so he can be lulled to sleep by its almondy notes.

“I feel like it’s actually a sleep-aid,” says McKay, 29, adding the scent is a little too feminine for him to wear out in public. Instead, he turns to his other 60 or so fragrance bottles to round out each day’s wardrobe with an olfactory finish.

In a world where more and more workplaces and public spaces are going scent-free due to people’s allergies and sensitivities, McKay is rebelling against the non-scents.

Working at an architectural firm, he often wears Creed's Green Irish Tweed — one of McKay’s most expensive perfumes at about $330 — which he describes as a “safe, clean, corporate scent” with a citrus, green smell.

“If I’m scared about offending someone in a suit, I would wear that one,” he said.

If McKay is heading out on a date, he might spray on L’Autre by French perfumer Diptyque or Jicky by Guerlain (the oldest perfume in continuous existence), both spicy mixes with the power to both attract and repel.

“This is one I would wear if I was feeling super adventurous,” McKay said of L’Autre, French for The Other. “They called it The Other because it’s pretty polarizing. It’s meant to recreate the experience of a spice market in Africa, so if you picture a spice market with all of these aromatics sizzling under the African sun, mixed with the sweat and the clothing of people who are working the market, that’s kind of what you get here.”

Jicky also has a sexuality and animalism to it, which makes sense, McKay said, since it contains musk excreted from the civet cat’s nether region, or a synthetic replacement.

“(Creator) Jacques Guerlain, who (also) created (the classic 1925 perfume) Shalimar said he always puts a bit of his mistress’s backside into every perfume that he makes,” McKay said.

Indeed, many perfumes are infused with a slightly funky smell, hearkening back to a time when human bodies weren’t always freshly cleaned but released intriguing odours and pheromones. Ambergris, for instance, is a rare substance used in few perfumes. It is essentially vomit from a sperm whale whose stomach coats sharp cuttlefish bones before spewing the intestinal sludge out to ripen on the ocean’s surface, eventually arriving on shore for a perfumer to discover serendipitously.

“It speaks to our biology,” McKay said of such smelly ingredients. “We are kind of hard-wired in the past, evolutionary, on hormones and pheromones and odours and bodies. There’s always that little bit of dirt.”

McKay said a blogger described the polarizing smells in perfumes perfectly.

“She said that Jicky reminded her of a game she would play with her siblings as a kid when they had a new baby,” McKay said. “They would go to the diaper pail and open it up and smell and then they’d retch and they’re run away and then they’d come back and do it again. There is something kind of wrong when you smell it. And it’s wrong, but it’s right. It’s kind of like that food you don’t really like but it’s addictive.”

McKay’s first fondness for fragrances was far more simple, when he admired the perfumes and colognes his mother and father exchanged as gifts.

“My dad would get Aspen or Quorum or something and my mom would get Georgio and I thought it was kind of interesting, grown-up,” McKay said. His first bottle arrived in Grade 7: the ubiquitous CK One of the 1990s where the Calvin Klein minimalist image was all the rage.

Scents like it came after the ’80s era of powerhouse, bold scents like Poison or Lagerfeld for men, McKay said: “The big, burly, curly-chest hair type of fragrance (and) Burt Reynolds-type of aftershave. Some people posit that because of the whole decadence, AIDS crisis, the esthetics changed. All of a sudden, that’s when aquatics, clean marine kind of minimalists, almost sexless scents, like CK One, came into popularity.”

But the popularity of scents has dipped even farther since, with many people claiming allergies and sensitivities to perfumes, particularly to the chemical and synthetic ingredients. Many workplaces discourage people from wearing fragrances.

McKay doesn’t pay special attention to such bans, since he sees scents as integral to his wardrobe and expression of identity and mood.

“I think people are over-sensitive. I don’t know how much is physiological and how much of it is cultural, to be honest,” McKay said. “I think over the years, scent has come and gone out of fashion.”

In the book Perfumes: The Guide, experts Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez say modern-day people may be particularly sensitive to smells because of society’s incredibly stringent standards.

“We also live in such unsmelly times, with most everyone bathing and washing clothes regularly, and public sanitation working invisibly and reliably to sweep away the foul detritus of the day, that the ordinary person may find herself sensitive to fragrance the way you might find yourself sensitive to noise after spending a week at a spiritual retreat where everyone talks in whispers and walks in cotton socks,” the two authors wrote in the 2008 guide to perfumes. Going scent-free isn’t the solution, they suggest.

“As with the tawdriest pop melody, there is a base pleasure in perfume, in just about any perfume, even the cheapest and the most starved of ideas, that is better than no perfume at all,” Sanchez writes in the introduction. “It decorates the day. It makes you feel as if the colours of the air have changed. It’s a substitute for having an orchestra follow you about playing the theme song of your choice.”

McKay describes it as putting on an accessory that increases his confidence. He recently read a study that suggested people who wear fragrances are more social people and more successful in their interactions.

Turin and Sanchez suggest people with sensitive noses should find scents they like.

“If instead you’d rather demand the whole world be utterly scent-free, you’re a drag,” they wrote.

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